Balance

So last week one of my clients went missing. I actually first read about it on Twitter (where apparently I get all of my news, like road closures and my dad’s release from Rwandan jail.) And I was instantly so startled and surprised myself how disturbed I was. He’s a really nice guy, so is his wife and I felt so sad for how scared she much be and worried about his safety. Long story short, he has returned home and it was something of a false alarm. But I thought of him a lot over that week, it had a much bigger effect on me than I would have expected.


This morning I learned a former client died. In this line of work, I guess, it’s not that unusual. I mean, many of my clients have drug and alcohol abuse issues, all of them are poor and have the difficulties taking care of themselves and their families that go along with poverty. But this woman was young, 23 and had an involved family. She had been in college at one point. From what I saw, there were some serious substance abuse issues and seemed to be a lot I didn’t know about her family, her past, why she numbed herself so often. So, sadly, it’s not surprising. Upsetting, sad, but not shocking.

In November my coworker and friend was hospitalized for a few days. I was covering some hearings for her and to each client I’d introduce myself and explain their attorney was in the hospital. Maybe one out of five asked a single thing about that—is she ok? What happened? I hope she gets better. And after that I was basically feeling like, “you jerks! We spend all our time and energy trying to take care of you, to help you, worrying about you and you don’t even care!” Shortly after I got pneumonia and was home for a week and only dragged myself to one hearing where actually the client was very grateful and concerned I was sick.

There was an article about public defenders and trauma that I posted on facebook a couple of months back. Some people took it to mean I was struggling with the issues in it at the time, I wasn’t, I just related to the story and thought it was interesting and important to share. It talks about secondary trauma, hearing the stories of client who have had horrible traumatic things happen to them. But there’s this other trauma, which is what they are experiencing in the system while I’m representing them. And I’m the one who hears that their pregnant wife and kicks are getting evicted because dad is jail. Or that they hitchhiked 85 miles in January to get to court so they didn’t get a warrant. Or that they didn’t have gas money to get to court, so they got a warrant and then got arrested and lost their job while they were in jail. Or things directly related to the case, that are horrible and traumatic and I am sometime inadvertently complicit in making happen, just by being a player in the system.

I guess my point is about the balance, the elusive balance between being able to be a compassionate and zealous advocate and being able to leave your work at work and not let the sadness and trauma of it leak into your home time. And that’s the thing, you can’t stop caring. I have immeasurable respect for a coworker who has been doing this 35 years and will get as righteously indignant as anyone about how someone is treated, the hijinx he sees the police pulling. I hope I can keep that feeling alive, without becoming burnt out.

So then there is also a balance between caring about clients and… everything else. Caring about myself, my homelife, my friends, my family, my DOGS. Lots of balance, lots of balls in the air.